Ever have the nightmare where you’re faced with a test you haven’t studied for? It usually goes like this: You find yourself, inexplicably, in an ultra-realistic dream where you’re taking a test you must pass at all costs, but you look at the questions and can’t make sense of any of them.

“Academic anxiety dreams,” as some researchers call them, are some of the most common and frequently recurring nightmares among adults. It probably has to do with the fact that when we’re in school, unrealistic expectations and pressures are often put on us where a single test can make or break our destiny.

They remind me of this year’s constitutional amendments and county charter questions on the general election ballot, because these are definitely the test you haven’t studied for.

I have two doctorates, a master’s, a bachelor’s, three post-graduate certificates – all of which I earned before age 35 – and now at 44, I’m working on my second master’s degree at the University of Hawaii. I am used to being confronted with hard, sometimes tricky questions that are meant to challenge one’s knowledge and push one’s cognitive flexibility to the limit.

But one look at this year’s ballot, and I immediately found myself snapping a photo of the questions and shooting off a text message to a friend in policy circles that read, “What the hell does this mean?”

Ballot questions in Hawaii have never been easy to answer. They’re written in dense legalese and many times, to answer them confidently, you need to understand the wider history of an issue, something that is hard to do when you’re in a rush to vote.

I know more than a few people who are scared to answer the questions, because they don’t want to “mess up” Hawaii. The good news is, since we have mail-in voting, we can spend a little time more time approaching the ballot questions like an open-book test.

Making Sense of The Questions

Anyone remember the movie “Star Trek IV”? (If you haven’t seen it, watch it, especially on the issue of taking difficult tests.) There’s a great scene where the Vulcan ambassador to the Federation, Sarek, tells the president, “It is difficult to answer when one does not understand the question.”

To understand the state constitutional amendment questions, we’ll need to visit three online resources. The first is the Office of Elections website on the two proposed constitutional amendments, where you can see the original bills that passed the Legislature and put the questions on our ballots. 

Let’s use Question 1 as an example. “Shall the state constitution be amended to repeal the legislature’s authority to reserve marriage to opposite-sex couples?” comes from House Bill 2802 HD1. 

On the right side of of the bill information page for HB 2802 HD1, there’s a section that says “Testimony” with three separate Adobe PDFs compiled from the three committees it was heard in that you can click and read what the public and various government and nonprofit entities had to say about it. Reviewing the bill that passed and the testimony that was heard is a useful way of catching up on the context of the question.

The second and third online resources we’ll need to visit simultaneously — so open new tabs on your browser — are the state constitution online and the 2024 General Election Guide provided by the Office of Elections.

Using Question 1 as our research example, we see from the text of HB 2802 HD1 that it seeks to amend Article I, Section 23 of the state constitution. Now we need to look at what Section 23 looks like in context, so let’s look at Section 23 on the state constitution website. The existing text reads:

Section 23.  The legislature shall have the power to reserve marriage to opposite-sex couples. [Add HB 117 (1997) and election Nov 3, 1998]

The reference text in brackets tells us that two landmark events impact the interpretation and enforcement of this section. The first is House Bill 117 from 1997, which proposed the constitutional amendment. The second is the subsequent Nov. 3, 1998, election where Hawaii residents voted “yes” on the question “Shall the Constitution of the state of Hawaii be amended to specify that the Legislature shall have the power to reserve marriage to opposite-sex couples?” which put that section in place.

We now need to look at the 2024 General Election Guide “comp sheet” on page 79 to see what happens if we vote yes or no or blank on this year’s Question 1. This guide is written in a somewhat circular way that doesn’t do us any favors, but it walks you through the fact that “yes” will delete Section 23 from the constitution and “no” will leave it there. 

For those of you who want a deeper read into the powers of the Legislature and Section 23, you can read a legal memo that was sent from the Attorney General’s Office to the Senate years ago when the Legislature was considering a marriage equality bill. A snippet from that memo tells us, “By its plain language, this provision does not require that marriages be limited to opposite-sex couples. Instead the section provides that the Legislature possesses the authority to limit marriage to opposite-sex couples by statute, should it choose to do so.”

Aha! “Should it choose to do so” is the thing we needed to know. Now we understand finally what this is about. If you vote “yes” on Question 1, you’re essentially saying “I don’t trust the Legislature to decide who is allowed to marry.” If you vote “no” you’re saying “I’ll keep the status quo, because the Legislature can have the flexibility to decide.” We had to do all that just to decode one ballot question! 

Now repeat this research method for Question 2, and you’ve completed the state section. Fortunately for us, the same Hawaii Voter Guide document that we looked at also has comparison sheets for the county charter amendments on pages 81 through 91, with hyperlinks in the lower right-hand corner to go to the appropriate pages for more information on those questions for deeper research.

The County Charter Questions

For those of us who live on Oahu, the Charter Amendment summary text is very useful because it has a “Present Situation” (the status quo) and a “If Proposal Passes” (voting yes) scenario, and the resolution it came from, so people can better understand the context. If you scroll to the bottom of the City & County of Honolulu charter amendment page, there are links to the full text of each of the resolutions that created the charter questions in multiple languages.

For the neighbor islands, you’ll need to visit each of the individual charter amendment summary pages: Hawaii County, Maui and Kauai, each of which are designed in a different way with varying degrees of drill-down for background research. 

Some of them make it easy for deeper research, including Hawaii County, which has a  a “Legislative History” page for their charter amendments. Others will require a little more digging, as is the case with the Maui charter questions and Kauai charter questions.

This is a lot of work to do to make informed decisions. A key part of advancing equity requires that we offer people choices in ways that they can understand, and if ballot questions are too hard to understand – especially for those with limited literacy or understanding of English – we may be setting people up to fail.

Why is school so stressful? Because in real life, school isn’t the only thing going on, and we don’t always have time to study, but we still get faced with a test that if we fail, we get punished for failing it.

That’s why we still have nightmares over tests years after they’re done, and these ballot questions, if we get it wrong, can impact us for years to come. It’s the punishment for doing your best and failing that makes this rite of passage stressful and upsetting.

Some of you might leave the questions blank. Others may just guess or flip a coin. However you approach this, we need to demand in future elections that these questions be written in an easier way to comprehend by people who don’t have the background experience, education or time to obsess over a perfect response.